Silence Laboratories, a cybersecurity startup headquartered in Singapore, has closed a $1.7 million round in seed funding, led by pi Ventures. The round also included participation from imToken ventures and prominent angels like Daniel Ari Friedman, Mahin Gupta, CK Vishwakarma, Priyeshu Garg, Ashish Tiwari, and others. The startup plans to use this funding to further widen its product offerings towards decentralised security, enrich the technology stack, strengthen its team and scale its go-to-market operations to help enterprises adopt state-of-the-art authentication and authorization techniques.
Founded by Jay Prakash and Andrei Bytes who met during their PhDs, Silence Laboratories (SL) is on a mission to provide business-friendly ways of distributed signatures and authentication libraries through a unique fusion of multi-party computation (MPC) based cryptographic algorithms, threshold signatures schemes (TSS), and intelligent multi-modal signal processing based layers of proofs including proof of proximity, co-location, legitimate possession, liveliness via activity, identity, and others.
Security concerns with digital wallets, institutional asset agencies, and exchanges have been critical problems and have quantifiably contributed to the loss of billions, such as nearly 20% of all Bitcoin in circulation. Silence Laboratories identified common key vulnerabilities in digital wallets and online exchanges, other issues due to mismanagement of private keys and phishing scams, and also proved how some of the most used authentication modalities (Push-based MFAs – Multi-Factor Authentications provided by leading IAMs – Identity and Access Management) are prone to several attack vectors. Based on their findings, the team designed their flagship products Silent Auth (MFA Library) and Silent Shard (Key and access management Library) which have their roots in multiple patents.
Silence Laboratories’ vision is to enable a developer-centric cryptographic infrastructure such that enterprises can adopt best-in-class cryptographic algorithms for key and access management without worrying about implementation and design details so they can focus on their core business.
SL has been working closely with several leading players, in the Web 3 ecosystem particularly, to develop Silent Shard and Silent Auth. They are designed to support varied demands of authentication and authorizations with a very high degree of contextualization, be it for digital asset custodians with high risks, non-custodial digital wallets, semi-custodial phone-based wallets, exchanges with high expectations on usability, mobility providers, sensitive government or medical institutions or cloud service providers. Silence Laboratories will soon release its product portfolio for integrations and announce some strong collaborations that will position them as a leading security partner of enterprises, irrespective of the blockchain applications.
“Among others, SL’s team integrated Silent Shard with MetaMask’s Snaps which in itself is a great example of how MetaMask has opened the wallet design ecosystem. The Snap-based designs will help to enhance wallet security and set benchmarks for MPC-based wallets,” says Jay Prakash, CEO, and Co-founder at Silence Laboratories.
“Account takeover due to a single point of failures of the private keys and absence of necessary forms of MFAs is on the unparallel rise and have been affecting enterprises in both Web2 and Web3 businesses. Hence, we are witnessing a growing push toward the need for distributed authentication protocols and signature schemes to address multiple recent attacks across different wallets and chains. Silence Laboratories is at the forefront of this revolution,” he added.
“Our cryptographic libraries hope to remove several active attack vectors prevalent in the industry today,” said Andrei Bytes, CTO and Co-founder at Silence Laboratories. “In our pursuit to facilitate easier adoption of our libraries and helping enterprises develop together, we recently joined premier global alliances such MPC alliance and Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF).”
“Issues with private key management have led to the loss of Billions of dollars in 2022 alone. The holy trifecta of ironclad security, great user experience, and developer-friendliness for Web 3 is yet to be cracked and we believe the team at Silence Laboratories is best placed to solve this. Jay and Andrei bring complementary skill sets with PhDs in signal processing and security respectively and their early traction is a testament to their innovative solution. We’ve been extremely impressed by the team at Silence Laboratories and are excited to back them in these times of constant hacks,” said Shubham Sandeep, MD pi Ventures.
Silence Laboratories is working on setting up an Applied Cryptography corporate R&D center in South Asia, with local and international collaborations. The center will attract some of the best talents globally to contribute to solving niche problems in usable security and MPC algorithms and set the backbone for several upcoming businesses and products.